[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: I was up till late working on notes last night because every time I would make a comment, another one would spring to mind. And so I've just got gobs and gobs of notes tonight to try to get through. But where we're going to start tonight, if you want to go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Genesis Chapter two, that's where we're going to start tonight. And while we're thinking about Genesis Chapter two and you're kind of uploading that story into your mind, I wanted to just give a recap of the last two classes. The first one, we talked about how biblical authors use different motifs and themes to express their theology throughout the works of the Bible. Then we talked about last week, ancient Near Eastern creation myths in view of the creation story in the Bible, and talked about the similarities and contrasts between those two and brought out the theme, the motif of the mountain from Creation Story. And if that's true, what does that mean for us in terms of how we're supposed to live our lives, either on the mountain or down below the mountain? And so tonight we're picking up in Genesis Chapter two, we're going to start in verse four. And you remember last week when we started with this, we said that Genesis 1, verse 2 is stated like a problem statement in that the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.
And then in Genesis 1, verse 3, God makes light fixing the darkness. On day 2 he fixes the chaos waters, and on day 3 he brings the land out because the land is now no longer formless and void. So in chapter two, verse four, these are the generations of the heavens and earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, which is akin to Genesis 1, verse 1. In the beginning, God created The heavens and the earth, these are the generations where this all happened. Genesis 2, verse 5, kind of corresponds to Genesis 1, verse 2, when no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant in the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.
Well, I know I'm pausing in the middle of a sentence here, but we've got the same structural language here of a problem statement. There is no plant on the ground, and there's no one to take care of the plants on the ground.
So in chapter two, verse six, a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. The Lord God formed man out of dust, so fixes the first problem. Now there's someone to take care of the land and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God fixed the first problem. Plants a garden in Eden, in the east. Which is interesting because east has two meanings. And so it's a difficult word to translate. It either means the direction east, which I think is roughly this direction in this classroom, or it is the direction of the sunrise. So the word for east is the word for not beginning, but early would be the same word for east. And so this could be in the east, actually on the cardinal diagram of the map, or it could just be way, way. You know, if you've ever listened to Joseph and the technicolored Dreamcoat, way, way back many centuries ago, back before all of these things were done. So the garden is in the east, and he put the man whom he had formed there in the garden. And. And out of the ground, the Lord made up to spring every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil was there also. And so we already have the problem statement. We have the solution.
The land now has plants, and there's someone to take care of the plants. And so already, Genesis 2, 4, 9 echoes the themes, the theology that we pulled out of one, chapter one and the end of chapter two, in that God has made man to take care of his house, God has made man to tend the garden, if you will. And so we have the same things already being brought out in the beginning. Different ideas here that I've read from different theologians. Some say the three primary ways that this is read is this is what happened on day six. So we're taking a deep Dive on day six. That's one view. The second view is, okay, this is a different version of the story. Like, Matthew and Mark might tell the same story. They're just telling it a different way. And so that could be that the Genesis 1 was more technical of, this is where the functions of the world came to be or where they came from. And then Genesis 2 is. Now, here is the relationship that man has with the Father that created him. So that's the second one. And then the third one is that you've got that we talked about source criticism. And, oh, man, I'm running a blank redaction criticism, informed criticism, that this is a redactional motif between two different people who took the tales of creation that were given as oral tradition down through the Hebrew line, and they wrote them both down independently of one another. Whatever it is, whatever it is between 2, verse 4 here, whether it's just picking up where the story of days one through seven left off, or whether it's just a different way to tell the story, we still get the same things. We still have man in a place, and we are supposed to take care of that place that God has created to work alongside him. Which I just think is really cool that we see that priestly role reaffirmed here in Genesis 1.
So with the priestly role here, we get this interesting pivot, and I promise you, we're bringing this back to the mountain.
In verse 10, we get this weird pivot where we're no longer talking about the plants and the man who's tending the plants and the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Now we pivot and say, a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden. And there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first was Pishon, the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there was gold, and the gold in that land was good. Bdellium and onyx stones were there. The name of the second river was Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is Tigris, which we still can find on a map in the Middle east today, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is from Euphrates. And so I. I don't know the first. You, You. When you. When you read the Bible, as. As this thing that can have element of discovery every time you read through it, it's one of those things of, like, it never once crossed my mind, like, what in the world is Going on here in terms of we're talking about man now we're talking about rivers, now we're talking about man again. And it could be some sort of chiastic structure, but what some authors have indicated is, let's see. Okay, good, it's working a little bit better this week. Is the way that you have a place splitting into four headwaters like we have here is that, well, the garden must then be on top of a mountain with each of these, the headwater that comes from the spring on the mountain splitting into these four rivers. And that blue is not showing up very well. I apologize for that. But here you would have the river of Pishon, and then you have Gihon right here. And then you've got Tigris and you've got the Euphrates river all coming down the mountain right here. The idea is that what a lot of Old Testament scholars believe is that this was read in the context of, well, if there's a spring at the top and it's splitting into headwaters and water flows downhill. And then what we have here is that maybe not on a literal mountain, but Eden here is at least at a high place. And so we've got the temple again, right? Like, just like we had as God's whole creation is his temple. We've got the temple at the top of the mountain. Because out of this place the waters flow. Well, when there is no plants on the land and there's. And there is chaos over the lands, what does water that comes from God's temple look like?
It looks like life giving water. So this contrasts the waters from Genesis 1, which were chaotic and there was darkness everywhere. And we have, there's no. We have to wait for God to take care of this. Now God himself is watering the land with life giving water instead of life taking water.
And it's all of the rivers that they would have been aware of.
What the author is trying to draw your mind back to is, listen, anything that we claim as life giving comes from this Garden of Eden up here at this high place. And so I, I'll be honest, the first time that I read through some of this stuff, I and heard it first on the Bible Project podcast and then read about it later, I was like, okay, that feels like a bit of a stretch. Like, okay, I get that water splits from springs into different headwaters and things like that. But you also see it, I think there's something interesting too, of you think of like the, you think of different headwaters of the Amazon river come in to feed the Amazon river but likely what might have been in their mind is you think of places like the Nile River Delta. The Nile river splits at the delta region into all of these different sub rivers. And so what's happening is this is coming from Eden. This is coming from God.
So what does this mean for us as people? If this is the picture that is given to the children of Israel as they're wandering around in the desert, the wilderness, for 40 years, hearing these stories over and over and over again, what is the takeaway for them? What's the takeaway from us, for us?
I wonder.
And if you're waiting on my answer, I haven't quite made up my mind yet. I'm eager to hear what y' all have to say about it.
The Lord provides. Yeah, that's. That's one of his names. Right. And that's the one that we're gonna do. Not next week because it's Thanksgiving, but the next week after that, we're gonna do Mount Moriah, which is where Moses was going to sacrifice Isaac. But the Lord provides a ram as a scapegoat, if you will, for that sacrifice.
So we'll get there, too. Yes, James.
[00:11:34] Speaker C: Israel's context believe each of these rivers had a God associated with it, where people would worship that God. This is right contrast of that saying, no, there is the God who has given us these rivers. There are no river gods that you're supposed to worship.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
I mean, anything that you claim is one of these regional deities or something like that, it all goes back to Yahweh, not any of these other stars.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: And all of them.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In fact, one of the things we're going to end on Tonight is Psalm 19, which is a creation psalm. The heavens declare the glory of God. Right. These are all things that point back to the God of the Bible.
Water is life.
Without water, we can't live.
You can live without food, you can't live without water. Yeah. And I want to pull on Juan's stream of thought there, too. I think both of these are right there with it. But where we're going to go, probably right up before Christmas or right after Christmas, we're going to talk about the Psalms and the prophets, how they talk about Eden as a mountain, and specifically the idea that out of these places, life comes out of these places. In fact, we as priests, we ascend this mountain to bring down that life, giving water to the rest of the nations, which is.
Who is Jesus talking to when he talks about the water of life? He's talking to a Woman at a well, and she's asking about which mountain is important, are we going to Zion? Are we going to, I think, Hermon or one of those other mountains or something? Like which one's the important one? He's like, listen, this is going to be a stream of water that is filling up inside you. That the implication is that we don't keep that to ourselves.
We share that with every. We carry that with us everywhere we go. So I want to hold on to that because let's jump a wee bit ahead in the Bible to if you're not convinced that Eden is on a mountain up here, you're in good company, because I was not either. But let's jump ahead to Ezekiel, chapter 28. So Ezekiel, one of the major prophets after Isaiah, Jeremiah, lamentations, then you have Ezekiel. What we have here is Ezekiel has switched gears from some of the history he has been talking about. And we have either In Ezekiel, chapter 28, a poem, a lament for the king or prince of Tyre.
Okay, great. But you've got. There are actually two laments for two different kings from two different lands who are kind of the big dogs in the region at the time. And so it is a lament of like, this is what you could have been with the God given power that you were given. And so if we look at this, we're going to start here in Ezekiel, chapter 28, and I think we're going to pick up in verse 11 here. Yes, in verse 11, moreover, the word of the Lord came to me, Son of man, raise a lamentation over the King of Tyre and say to him, thus says the Lord God, you are the signet of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. You are in Eden, the garden of God.
Here's this pagan king and he's being talked about using the language of Adam. You were the. You were the pinnacle of creation. I put you in the garden to be in communion with me. And you've got the king of Tyre, a pagan king, who is being compared to this guy. You were in Eden, the garden of God, where every precious stone was your covering. Sardius, topaz, diamonds, beryl, onyx, Jasper, sapphire, emeralds, carbuncle, and crafted in gold, which one of the rivers Pichon was talking about. It flows into the region where the good gold is, where your settings and your engravings on the day that you were created, they were prepared. So on day six, you've got the or in the present context, verse 14, you were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you, you were on the holy mountain of God, in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
We have here the garden and is superimposed on a mountain that this King of Tyre who is being used in terms or talked about in terms of second Adam, Adamic language, I guess, would be the best way to say that as being placed not just in the garden, but in the garden on top of the mountain of God. So the prophets read into this language. I don't know if they pick it up just from chapter two, verse 1010 and Genesis and the following verses about rivers or if there was some other oral tradition. But several scholars out there talk about this in the sense of, listen, if you have the garden, then you have a mountain. And so what I'm trying to get out here is if this is all about the mountain motif, then what we cannot ignore going forward is a lot of times, and we'll come back to this over and over and over. If you remember the first class, I said, hey, a lot of the mountains before the prophets are looking back at Eden. And a lot of the mountains after the prophets are looking forward to the new Zion.
Well, we have it here. The prophets are looking back saying anytime we're talking about a garden, we're also talking about a mountain. And these themes borrow from one another meaning.
The themes of life and the beauty that we receive from the garden are also the themes of life and beauty and that we get when we have God's blessing coming down the mountain. And there are some theologians. If you go back to Genesis chapter two, we're going to pick up now Genesis chapter two and verse 15.
Let's see. So Genesis two, verse 15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it.
The words work and keep are the same Hebrew words that are given in numbers to the priests when they are given their jobs to take care of God's tabernacle. That the function that the priests had was the same function that Adam was supposed to have in the garden. Well, what were the priests supposed to do? We see Israel in their context. And we talked about this some in the college class last quarter when we were talking about the church on Israel's good days they did their job, but from a stance of puffed out chests. And you know, we're a little bit better because God has elected us over the nations and we are God's chosen people. And then on their bad days, they're trying to be just like the rest of the nations. But the idea of the priests and what they were supposed to do is to enter God's house and then to leave God's house. And upon leaving God's house, they take the blessings of God to the people of Israel, who, according to the book of Isaiah, are supposed to be delivering that to the rest of the world anyway.
So the priestly role, and different theologians say different things, that this idea that the garden had boundaries even as far back as the beginning, and so we're supposed to expand this garden out to the rest of the world.
It's give or take from what I've read on whether whether this was supposed to be an expansionist kind of mentality or not from the beginning. But what I'm trying to give you a precursor to is after the fall, one of the things that we're going to talk about in terms of mountain is there is very clear ideology of going up to the mountain to descend back down from the mountain with the blessings of God, the mountain of God. And we'll pick up on those in later weeks. I'm just trying to. To get you primed for that now that whether this was an expansion thing and descend the garden down the mountain before the fall was true. It's definitely true after the fall. And we'll pick up there in just a little bit, so. Or at least over the next couple weeks. So the Lord God took the man, put him in the garden to work it and keep it, which is the same role the priests had. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you should surely eat of every tree in the garden. It's yours. The blessings of my communion are yours. Please partake in them. But the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in that day that you eat, you will die.
And so God has drawn a very generous line in the sand. Different theologians talk about what I think it was. Athanasius was one of the theologians who said, like, man was going to sin anyway. But whether man was going if.
Whether Adam was always going to sin or not, he's one of the few that says that Adam was always going to sin. The point is, is that God gives a choice, right? This is the tail end of the book of Deuteronomy, and this is the tail end of the book of Judges. No, Joshua, I give before you today two choices. If you do all these things, if you walk with me, if you follow in my commands, you will have all of these blessings.
I will keep from you every disease. I will do all these things for you.
But if you don't, then you will Experience all the same pain that you experience if you leave my garden, if you leave my mountain.
And what I love. I can't remember if it's Deuteronomy or Joshua off the top of my head. I love that at the tail end of those two chapters, so these very long discourses, whether it's Moses at the end of Deuteronomy or Joshua at the end of book of Joshua, he has to explicitly say, choose life.
Right? Like in case it was not clear enough for you. You have all of these things here in the garden, for you have all of these blessings here. The source of life itself, the tree of life, the life giving waters are present here. Choose life, don't choose death.
But we fast forward a little bit here to verse 18. We have man should not be alone. And so God takes a part of him and makes from him from that part a woman called Eve. And Adam says, this is at last bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed.
Great.
Who knows how long this lasted? We're not given any sort of timeline here, but we have that perfect communion we talked about back from day six, when God gives man his job in the garden.
And then verse three, chapter three, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God has made. He came to the woman.
Did God really say, maybe he wants you to eat of the fruit? Maybe this is a test. Right? One of the things that we're going to talk about throughout the Bible is throughout mountains of the Bible is that often mountains are associated with a test. I'm not trying to say that we have to read that explicitly in here, but one of my favorite.
If you want some.
How can I say this literary creativity about this story, like these seven verses here, C.S. lewis's Perelandra is a great. Like, he writes 20 chapters. That is basically a blowout of what's going on here in the garden. And it's. And it's in the way that C.S. lewis crafts it. It's one of those things that you're almost like man.
I know the end of the story. And yet the way that he delivers it, maybe it's a test. Maybe God wants you. Maybe he's seeing if you're ready to become like him.
Of course, that's literary creativity. What we know explicitly from the Bible is we May eat of. Eve responds to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the tree of the garden. And God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither should you touch it. Which was a bit of offense around that, lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, he won't die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, which is exactly what he says. Interestingly, after they do eat it, you will be like God, knowing good from evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and the delight to the eyes and the tree was desired to make one wise, she took it and ate it and gave some to her husband. That is one of those we talked about on the first day of class. Structural motifs, not just setting motifs. That is a structural motif that shows up all over in the Bible. Someone taking and eating or partaking in the thing that they've taken, the forbidden fruit, if you were, and then giving it to someone else. One of the classic examples is Sarah takes her handmaiden Hagar and gives it to her husband, and her husband partakes in the forbidden fruit of sleeping with his wife's servant. And so you have this taking and eating, which is always associated with, we are doing something that we could have followed and listened to God's command, or we can figure out our own way to do it. And so the idea is, we have. We're already in the garden, but what if instead of God being the person who is the source of life here, and what if I could do that without him? What if in the first book of the space trilogy of C.S. lewis, one of the problems that some of the people state about humanity is that they are all trying to be their own God, that they are all trying to take of the thing that is not yet prepared for them. It's not that God necessarily didn't want them to be learning good from evil, but if any of you have kids, how many times do you tell your child, do this or don't do this because you're trying to spare them pain or some other frustration. And they say, well, guess what? I can jump from this couch to the other one and make it just fine. And then they fall and they hurt themselves and you have a crying child on your hand for the next 15 minutes. Right? Like, this is a bit of an exaggerated. Not a bit. This is an exaggeration, but I think it's that same childlike mentality of, like, I Can do this on my own. I don't need you.
And so are we going to choose to stay in the garden or not? They eat of the fruit, both the man and the woman. They hear the sound of God walking in the garden, which shows up here in some of our later texts. And by showing up later in the garden, we have this conversation. The blame game happens. The serpent is cursed. Childbearing becomes more difficult for the woman. The ground which was blessed in the garden to be something that was, something that we can work alongside, is now cursed because of this. And here's the one that I want to pick up on because I want to spend some time and pause here. The man. This is verse 20 of chapter three. The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living things. And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them.
The Lord God said, the man has become like one of us, knowing good from evil.
Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man. And at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed a cherubim, so the gate being on the east side, and the flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way of the tree of life.
Now, we're pressed for time here, but maybe an exercise that you can do when you leave here is the sinful acts that follow in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Cain moves further east, and then all of his descendants move further east until they are in Babylon, essentially. And that's where, in chapter 11, we pick up, and that's where they build their tower. So the idea of moving east is associated with the idea of moving away from God. So God sends them out of the garden. If you read a lot of Western theologians, they place this more in the idea of you have a disappointed father who says, like, listen, you cannot partake of this any longer. I wish you had chosen better.
Some Eastern theologians that I had to read for this class, they frame it a different way of saying that this was an act of grace, an act of mercy by God, to say that man is now sinful, he knows good from evil. Unless he live forever in that state, we have to send him out so he doesn't take part of the tree. And not taking part of the tree, then he can die and we can redeem him through that death. Which is an interesting motif I'd never really picked up on that before, but. And I'm not, I haven't studied that extensively, but it's one of those things that's just interesting to read through. Now the place where I'd like to pick up here is this idea of moving east.
Because if you have never seen this before, this was news to me. If you jump ahead to let me look in my notes here, like I said, this was at 11 last night, that all of these were kind of swirling around in my head.
I was in that group me message that I put out. It's in Exodus, Exodus, chapter 20, something I can't remember. But anyway, where God tells Moses, hey, listen, I want you to build a tabernacle. And it's going to be 45ft long and it's going to be 15ft wide and it's going to be 15ft tall. And then on this part you're going to have a 15 by 15 by 15 foot cube. And this is going to be the most holy place.
And here you're going to have the holy place and the court of the tabernacle. And, and the tabernacle entrance itself opened to the east. The primary cardinal direction to the Hebrews, as far as most scholars can tell, was not north, it was east, where the sun rises. And so what you are seeing here is if we are the high priest getting to deliver our gift at the altar once a year, where I finally get to enter the most holy place, instead of traveling to the east, we are now traveling back to the west. We are now coming back into God's presence, the most holy place, which is where the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark of the Covenant sat. Whoops, wrong pin. The Ark of the Covenant sat right here.
Don't know its primary orientation, but this is in some, some language in the Bible. It's the mercy seat. So it is the throne where God rests. In other places in the Bible, it is the footsteps stool of God's throne beneath the place in his cosmic realm where he meets with the high priest when he enters here. Okay, so maybe the tabernacle is like Eden, right? Maybe it's like a mountain in Ezekiel. One of the passages that I put out there in Ezekiel, it is very explicitly a mountain, or it is in a poetic way a mountain. In Ezekiel, chapter 40, you'll find that when you enter the courtyard of Ezekiel's eschatological temple, the end times temple, when you enter the courtyard, you go up eight steps. And when you come into the new temple, at the entrance of this new temple, you go up eight More steps. And when you come into the most holy place, you go up eight more steps. So this idea that ascending or going west is also ascending the mountain of the Lord, which comes back to Psalms, the Psalms of ascent, Psalm 120 through 134. We are entering God's presence by going up his mountain.
But is that enough to place this as a mountain in Garden of Eden with just the tabernacle alone? Well, what else was in the tabernacle? Do you remember?
You have a lamp stand and if you read the description of the lampstand which was down here on the south side, it describes it as having buds of almond leaves on it and being described as a tree that reaches out. And so what not Christian scholars, but Jewish scholars have written is, hey, this is reading a lot like the tree of life that you enter into this holy place here and all of a sudden on our left hand side we have God's tree of life right before us.
And does anybody remember what was in the Ark of the Covenant?
The tablets of stone that were given to Moses on the mountain were placed in there. What were the tablets of stone?
You shall have no other gods before me. Don't make graven images.
If you want to know how to live on the mountain, if you want to know how to live on the garden, here's the way to do it. If you want to know what me sharing with you the tree of knowledge of good and evil looks like, it's right here inside of this ark. We have both trees here according to Jewish scholars inside of the tabernacle. Not to mention you also have here the altar of incense. You've got the table of showbread, the life giving bread there. I posted, if you want to look in my notes, for the sake of time, I think we're going to skip ahead. But in my notes I cite two different papers here. One is by Beale, the other is by Windham. I think the first is actually a Christian author, the second one is a Jewish author. But you've got descriptions in the tabernacle and in the temple. In Leviticus, Deuteronomy 2 Samuel of God walking to and fro like he does in the garden inside of his temple.
So they cite that. You've got the cherubim you've got in Solomon's temple on the left and right hand side of the Ark of the Covenant, he actually places two cherubim. And inside of that most holy place, they are guarding God's presence. They are there just like the cherubim is guarding the Entrance to Eden.
You've got the tree of life being the lampstand. You've got the priestly role being the same.
In Ezekiel, chapter 47, this end times temple that gets created coming out of the front of the temple and is a river that goes out into all the nations. And so from the temple here, from the tabernacle, from this holy place, we have the same life giving waters at the end of time from God's temple that we have from Eden at the beginning of time. So again, we're looking back at that. What else do we have?
You have the ornate beauty in Solomon's temple.
Everyone thinks of the cedars of Lebanon. You have cedars of Lebanon. Every. The idea that you are surrounded by trees and woods is present all around you. James, another thought.
[00:34:23] Speaker C: You also have the cherubim on the curtains.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: The cherubim on the curtains, yes.
[00:34:27] Speaker C: And you also have, when Aaron's sons fail to give the right sacrifice, they are consumed by the sword of fire.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: Yeah, by this. By the cherub that is guarding the most holy place.
Yeah, I hadn't written that one down. Thank you. You've got the, the tree of knowledge of good and evil there with the tablets of stone being in there. I'm trying to think if I'm missing anything here, but if you look at my notes, I've got all of these different things there that you can go and look at. The scripture represents themselves. But the question here, and I struggle with this a little bit because in my mind, good theology is always practical. But the question we need to at least ponder for ourselves today is, okay, this happened 2, 4, 6,000 years ago, however long ago it was. And that was an ancient ritualistic practice that we have some elements adopted from that and some we don't. But like, if I'm teaching some of my physics classes at university, it's who cares, right? Like, okay, we've explored all across the Hebrew Bible at this point, the Old Testament, but what does that mean for us today?
What are y' all's thoughts about what this means for us today in terms of the mountain, the garden, and now the temple being coincident with one another? In biblical Hebrew theology, when you look.
[00:35:59] Speaker D: At our education system, kids go to school, they learn what's one plus one.
When they go to college, they learn calculus, integrals, derivatives, and all that kind of stuff. You got to start from the beginning and grow and learn more about God and learn more about God. Then, you know, there was the time of the, like Abraham and those guys, that was a relationship with God. Then they went to the Ten Commandments and all that kind of stuff. And then in the fulfillment of time, Christ came and died for us. Now we're at the end times, so we should be at our highest knowledge that man can have about God and how to relate to God.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: We're not going to be there for like, another eight weeks. Slow down. We've got a long way to go before we get there.
But, yes, you're right. Yes.
[00:36:59] Speaker C: The New Testament authors talked about the church being the new Tabernacle.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Okay. Yes. Do you have specific verses in mind?
[00:37:07] Speaker C: First Corinthians 6.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Yes.
Specifically, if you want to look there, it's First Corinthians 3:16 and Second Corinthians 6. Yes. Yeah.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: And then there's also in Acts, chapter two, when the fire comes down, the tongues of fire imagery, as when God blesses the first temple, when Solomon builds it. It's the exact same.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
In Hebrew, the Shekinah of the Lord descends. You're getting ahead of me, too. We're going to talk about that with Moses either two weeks from now or three weeks from now. But. Yes. Yeah.
[00:37:41] Speaker C: But it was very obvious to the New Testament writers that the church itself is supposed to be the tabernacle where people can come and get life and also learn the commandments and how to live on the mountain when we come together.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: One of the ones that I have written down that you're referencing here is First Corinthians 3, 16, 17. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that his spirit lives within you? If someone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, which is what you are. Right. Like that streams of life coming down from the mountain.
This is something that the church, this. This place that these people here that are gathered in this room and in this building right now, this is supposed to be a source of life for Madison, Alabama, that. That people can come here on this. I think if you were here when. When Madison Church of Christ was brought together from the two different churches years ago, like, this was a little side hill that was right here in Hughes. Like where.
This is a place that people can ascend to have life again. The abundant life of John 10:10. And individually.
Oh, 1 Corinthians 6. Yes, I have that one written down, too. The first ones were corporate.
This one is individual. First Corinthians 6. Do you not know that your own body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is within you, whom you have from God and That you are not your own. Yes. That we as individual Christians, that this isn't some weird, like, far out thing. That the actual point of this is that the church itself is the temple, which is just a mirror of Eden or the mountain.
And we as Christians do the same thing.
So I know when you're doing your daily Bible reading plan and you're hearing about all these weird rules and laws and the seemingly abstract dimensions of the temple and tabernacle and the roles of the priests and the weird garments that they wear and all this other stuff, like it is a time that you can put your Bible down and stop your daily Bible reading plan for the fifth or sixth time that you've tried to do the daily Bible reading throughout the whole Bible, whatever it might be.
Or that can be a time to say, like, there is a lot of stuff here that I need to pay attention to as a Christian, because it is incredibly relevant to me today if I'm watching for the correct stuff. Oh, man, we haven't even gotten to Noah. Another thing I think that is not a. The college students are laughing. They know I never finish a lesson all the way.
One of the things that I think we can pay attention to as well is if we are little gardens of Eden going out into the world, to me, it makes passages like Galatians, chapter five make a little bit more sense too. Listen, cultivate within yourselves the fruit of the spirit. The fruit of the spirit, by the way, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. That these are the things that if you want to. If you want to experience what it is to have communion with God, these are the fruits of the labor that you need to be cultivating in your own lives. That is ascending the mountain of the Lord. And listen, I'm listening to another podcast that one of the folks in here sent me, and they're counterimposing this with mountaintop experiences like great highs versus deep valleys, where you experience low places on earth. And I think that's the point, is that, yes, this is not a place that we live throughout our lives every day.
And I don't think we're called to. In fact, if we look at the prophets, which we will later in this class, as we look at the prophets, the whole point was to be one who ascends, who then descends again to show more people the way up the mountain, right? Like we are cutting God cut the road for us. That was back at the beginning with Genesis, chapter three after the fall. Hey, there's going to be somebody who's going to see this snake, the snake's going to catch his heel.
But, man, my descendant is going to crush his head, right? I've already got the road laid out for you. You just have to learn how to walk it and show others the way to walk it as well. Right? Like this is what we're supposed to be doing. And if I can summarize, in three minutes, Noah, you've got Noah. The world has descended further and further and further into chaos. And you've got one man and his family that represent life.
They are described as people who are blameless.
Noah's name in Hebrew means rest. And so we have here again a new Adam. And to point to that, with this new Adam, build an ark which is going to be this source of life amidst the chaos waters. See, we have our garden again.
You have a single door on the ark that God himself opens or shut, just like the doors of Eden. And you have in Genesis chapter 7, God invites them in, just like God placing them into the garden. You've got the animals come to them, not to be named, but to be saved. You've got in Genesis 7, 11, 12, 17, that day two is reversed, this parting of the waters. All of a sudden, they're coming back up from the deep and they're descending back down from the heavens. Genesis chapter 7, verse 18.
The ark was above the waters, above even the mountains that God had created. The ark itself is like this little mountain of life that is gliding over the chaos waters. And then in chapter eight, then we switch back, and we've got a new mountain and a new Eden, because the ark rests on Ararat, which it rests just like, same word that God rested on day seven. And the ark rests on the seventh month. God restates the mandate to Noah just like he said to Adam, be fruitful and multiply. Go into, fill the land.
Genesis chapter nine. The mountain is the place of meeting and communion. The mountain is a place of covenant. Noah plants a garden, a vineyard, which great. Okay, that's. That's kind of what we should be doing. But then he gets drunk. He chooses death over life. And then he finds himself naked, and his son Ham shames him in his nakedness. But then his sons Shem and Japheth come in and clothe them, clothe Noah, just like God clothed Adam and Eve. So we've got all of these motifs of what it looks like to actually live out the mountain of the Lord, or what it should look like. But how Noah himself fails, just like the previous Adam failed. And so trying to cut ahead here, the last place that I want to live on the mountaintop, God desires communion with humanity and our desires are correct. When we desire communion with God, though humanity has fallen, God carves a road for us back up the mountain. We, like Noah are meant to live as ones worthy that's supposed to be worthy to live on the mountain and God desires to make us wise. I wanted to end in Psalm 19, so maybe pick up there. Psalm 19:7 says that making wise the simple is what the law of the Lord does. And our lives are preserved on the Lord's mountain which is just like, just like Noah's ark if you will, just like Eden amidst the chaos of the world around it. So I'm sorry that we didn't have time to rest here for a little bit more, but thank you guys. I'll see y' all next week, two weeks from now. Two weeks from now.
